The First Three Stages of Life – An Interview with Frank Marrero

 

Layman Pascal: I’m Layman Pascal on the integral stages, author of ‘Integral Life’ series traipsing through books, pamphlets, publishing enterprises, and more from around the world of developmental transcendental, trans rational meta discourse. You know, the one today we’re doing something slightly different. Frank Marrero school teacher, Adi Da devotee and frequent contributor to the legendary Beezone website is indeed an author. But today we’re looking at some teaching materials that he’s written specifically to introduce the concepts, opportunities and pitfalls of early developmental stages to children. So let’s delve into some big philosophy for little kids and examine the patterns of growing up with a bright guy who was always a pleasure to talk to. Hi Frank. Hey, how are you doing?

Frank Marrero:  Fantastic. Great to see you.

Layman: Yep. Um, let’s try to give people a sense of what you’ve been working on here. You’ve been developing a kind of curriculum phrasiology and exercises to assist children in the first few maturational Stages.

Frank:
Yes. I have a curriculum called big philosophy for little kids, and it’s a curriculum that’s used in public school. It was used in public schools. You can find it either on my website, FrankMarrero.com or on Amazon. I need to dovetail and say I’m in I’m in a group of people who we’re doing this for adults. So not just tell children about what it is to grow up, tell adults about what they missed about growing up. So the theme is still the same, Really Grow Up!

Layman:
So yeah, we’ll get a, I think a little bit later, we’ll want to focus a bit on that adult thing in terms of what we can do to repair and, and deal with and heal and aid to those stages. We might not have gone through perfectly, but when it comes to children what do you think kids gain by having clarity and framing of their own development as they go through it, rather than as most of our ancestors did just sort of experiencing it and finding their way through in the dark?

Frank:
Well, it’s like every person of whatever age, if you have a vision of where you’re going, it’s easy, there’s an elegance that goes along with knowing where you’re going. And that’s true for if you watch, somebody build a Lego set that you’ve never seen before. Oh, that’s how it’s going. It’s simple. If you have an actual vision of what, where you’re going then going, there has a natural elegance. I’ve had kids come back – I’ve been doing this for decades – I’ve had kids come back after they were adults and say that this course we took, I took them through was the most useful thing in their entire schooling career, particularly in the third stage or the adolescent years, there’s a liability or a test. And in the third stage it was called, I call it the three-headed dragon of dilemma, doubt, And depression.

And I say, look, the three-headed dragon bites, everyone. No one gets out of adolescence without a real tussle with dilemma, doubt and depression. And, you know, as you know, teen suicides are a thing and that’s because they didn’t know it was a dragon that they were dealing with, if you know it, that the dragon is going to encounter a dragon instead of just being eaten you at some point when you’re going down and you go, wait a minute, this is the dragon. Okay. I know what to do. So it, I felt like it actually saved lives, not just in, not just made lives better.

I appreciate that.

Layman:
Okay. So for anybody who is watching your listing, I think we’re getting into some considerations later about how this scaffolding of stages relates to other ways of envisioning maturation. What are the general principles of growth? How does development relate to transcendence? You know, what are some of the higher stages, that sort of stuff? Well, let’s get started by really digging in and going through these first three and then exploring in a little bit more depth. What are the traps and limitations that commonly lead to the adolescent stagnation? Uh, well said. All right. So uh, what are the first three stages? And then let’s, let’s dig into the first one.

Frank:
Okay, well let’s go, let’s start way back at the Vedas. And in the Vedas said there were three stages of of, of maturation early maturation. And they said, the first stages goes from the first breath to the loss of primary teeth. That stage one, stage two is the beginning of your permanent teeth. As we call it in America to onset of puberty, approximately although Menzies and all those things can happen over such a wide range. That’s really not accurate. So think of it in seven years, zero to seven, six to 13, 12 to 20, somewhere like that. It’s not a definitive line, but there’s overlap as one melts into the next. So those are the first three stages in the Vedas. They said, treat your first stagers like gods treat your second.

Stager’s like servants and treat your third stagers like adults. Now, what they meant by that is that obviously you don’t treat them as gods. In the first few years, we have enough megalomaniacs running around. It meant the kind of service that is going to be required of you in the second stage, you are dealing with energies. And so you need to learn to put your energy out in the third stage. You, it is called trial adulthood, so that there that’s a very hard, difficult stage because your you’re no longer a child and you’re not yet an adult. So it’s trial adulthood. So that was the Vedic vision. I learned this in detail from my beloved Adi Da who had me serve the children’s culture. And as he pointed out, if you serve you, if you get a discriminative acuity about what each of the stages is of growing up, it will serve you as an adult.

So I was thrown in with the kids where I belonged and and I learned a lot. So the first stage starts with the first breath. It it’s focuses in the body. It matures in simple autonomy. Now it’s not just that you can pee pee by yourself pool, dress yourself go to sleep by yourself and you, and you can say, I do it. And it’s not just that. I tell people, imagine a child running down a path. Usually in the first few years, they’d always looking back to see if mom or dad, if they’re okay, everybody knows what that looks like. What, at some point they are so rested in themselves, they don’t look back to make sure they’re okay because they know they’re okay. So, that’s an example of the kind of autonomy I’m talking about now what can be what makes most sense to a first child in the first seven years is bodily.

That doesn’t mean you don’t talk to them. It doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings. It doesn’t mean they can’t understand a logical argument, but that’s not where they’re at. You know, where they’re really at is how their body feels. Um, and so you would discipline a first stager as, as we would say, by giving them a hug. No, Hey, come here. You’re feeling bad. Come here. Let me have a hug. Or, you know, if you’re going to keep that up, you should sit over here. And when you’re ready to come, when you’re ready to, you know, not bang the table so loud, come back with us. Okay. It’s, it’s bodily that’s what makes most sense to them. And the test of that is to not just be only body, just want to have ice creams all the time and watch TV getting dull. The couch potato would be a something anyone of any age could fail at this first level of adaptation. If you’re a lot of couch potato doing your that’s represents a failure. It’s not that you can’t sometimes obviously enjoy it. Sometimes you just need to chill, but have it be too much, that would be an error or a liability of the first level of adaptation. It’s a that’s that’s that is any, you have any questions about that?

Layman:
Or, you know adults who are around this person, right. We’re, we’re primarily trying to help them establish physical self-regulation and communication, something like that. And then that means not too much of any given thing.

Frank:
Yes. But the, the autonomy is, can be seen in adults or a failure of it is, do you fundamentally trust, can you rest, can you be by yourself without stimulation, you know, do you accept your own character or personality, or do you kind of hide parts of it or want to change parts of it, or is that, is that one of your obsessions within that’s an example of not having completed the first stage? So do you fundamentally trust the people who you’re close to? Right. So that is what it looks like in adults. So, as an example,

Layman:
I’m curious about the you know, the development of the skills of being being able to show up as your bodily self with people, and also being able to give and receive, you know, energy and feeling with other bodies. Uh, so that’s, that’s all within this. There’s, there’s like a range of different kinds of self-regulatory and communicative skills that needed to be developed here.

Frank:
Right. And are you someone in that play, as you mentioned it, are you self generative or are you passive waiting for others to, or are you just always being responsive or reactive? You know, rather than participatory someone is participating is rested as who they are. And so that is a sign of the fulfillment of that stage of life. Um, you know, so that’s, that’s a and the true, full trusting autonomy is a sign of that fulfillment also as adults, do you have food issues, you know, cause that’s body, so are you like, oh, are you anorexic? You know, or, or in other words, oh, we only have to eat this way. And only this food is good and oh, only this kind of food is best. That’s, that’s actually a, a sign that you have not completed the fundamental trust of the first stage of life,

Layman:
A huge, it seems like a huge amount of the classic psychotherapy disciplines focused around this area. Like, you know, how do I regulate my bowels and how do I eat and what was my relationship to the breast and all these sorts of very basic capacities and trusts,

Frank:
Right? So this is what it is to, well, why we call our, our, our workbook we’re working on really grow up. Um, and like I said, I came to this by serving children for decades and becoming sensitive to the to the possibilities of actually serving children, which then meant, oh yeah, the person in the mirror as well. So,

Layman:
So so sort of two directions there, one is what should adults understand in terms of creating spaces and relating to children about the pitfalls, the things that can go wrong in this stage and how to prevent them from going wrong. And on the other hand, you know, what is it that a child in this age range is capable of understanding about itself and about the phase that it’s going through with sort of limited reflective capacity?

Frank Marrero
Well, they understand through don’t, don’t talk to them too much. You know, how many times have I sat around a playground and watch the mom or dad start, well, you know, you can’t do that because a lot of blah, blah, blah, I love how the peanuts cartoon shows would have the grownups talking like this “rah, rah, rah, rah”. That’s all you hear when you’re a kid. Uh, so it should be really simple and it should be bodily based that what that’s, what they understand, they won’t understand concepts. They won’t understand parables, they’ll understand magic fairy tales and some stories. That’s how they understand. And they understand most explicitly through the body. There is also stages, of course, in that first stage that we, you know, there’s re reproachment phase in about 18 months. There’s about four years old. You’re there one, the children are no longer, so embedded in the growth that they can then take a breath by themselves.

For instance, prior to that, and you can take your little one year old, two year old and your arms and go, oh, I’m sorry, you’re doing so bad. I’m sorry. You fell down. Let’s take some big breasts together and you can, you can do it with them about four. They can start to do that by themselves prior to that, they can’t they have to, they can participate in no, you’re just laying around all day, watching TV, watching screens, let’s go out and play. Let’s be active. They can understand, oh, I see. This is much happier. They can understand that. Not to be a couch potato, not to be dull. That’s the one, the errors is to just be passive in our screen, late in age, it’s particularly difficult. So w what’s your take

Layman:
On the, there’s sort of a classic disagreement that human beings have had about this stage in terms of the expression of distress in young people, right? So that there’s one school of thought. That’s come up a lot over the history of our species, where they’re upset, they’re crying or something. You, you leave them to go through that emotion completely and learn to self-regulate in that form. And then another school, which thinks that’s a request for an interaction, for a physical interaction, with a caregiver to help them learn, to stabilize and harmonize themselves rather than just suffer through that eruption.

Frank:
Oh as my beloved Adi Da says every, in every inappropriate behavior as a sign of a loss of intimacy, that’s good to remember that if you’re seeing inappropriate behavior that’s a signal that the intimacy they’re suffering a lack of intimacy. So, you know, there’s a, there are times when I remember this, I’ve seen on Facebook where the kids are throwing a fit, and then the mom moves out of the picture. So she, the kid throwing the fit, can’t be seen that the camera can still see and they go look and move closer. As soon as the mom can see them or dad and not to be sexist. But uh, but as soon as the child can be seen, they can throw the fit, right. And there’s places you just, I used to tell my kid when I was, he’s crying about having his diaper, change that, Hey, it’s a red world.

It’s true. You can share that the life is difficult, but it’s happy, you know, is ADI does says it’s a, it’s a, it’s a difficult life, but it’s a, but it’s a happy way in it. So when they’re in a situation where they’re not feeling intimate, the main thing to do is restore the sense of intimacy. They know you’re there. Now, if they wanted to dramatize, in addition to that, well, that’s another artful matter. Maybe sometimes you let them cry it out. Most of the time, you don’t need to do that. Most of the time you restore the sensation of intimacy.

Layman:
What do you remember from going through that phase?

Frank:
Oh, I remember. I remember I have a perfect memory. I remember from age one on really clearly. Well,

Layman:
What, what stands out to you as symptomatic of a stage one in your, oh, I

Frank:
Could eat it. Yeah. I can eat as much sugar as I wanted. I remember that. Uh, so I do remember that, but in my, you know, I was very independent because my parents had to work. So I was left with lots of people and they didn’t seem fine. I took off, I was so which, which led me to have a, kind of a hyper independence in my, in my adulthood, which leads itself to, I don’t need anything or anybody. So there’s a liability from that early years, that then became a weakness in my adult years. So, but that also may be quite capable. I was, I was a rich young man by the time I was in my mid twenties, because I was completely sufficient. Well, that over sufficiency has its liability side too. So,

Layman:
All right, let’s go onto the second. Talk to us. Yeah. What happens once I get my real teeth? You can bite bigger apples!

Frank:
Well, as you, and we all know that as we can rest, we can start to feel more. And that’s just plain old…anybody, anybody, any day, once you come to a kind of arrest, then that naturally that thing that grows from that is a, is an increased sense of feeling. And so just like the first stage was focused in the body. The second stage is focused in energy or feeling, and it sensitivity energy. And because of that membership is you, you want to be, everybody wants to be included at all ages, but it’s prominent in these states whose I’m, I’m in this person’s club and I’m going to start a club and, and um they don’t like me at school. All these kinds of things about membership. These are all energetics, sensitivity energies coming with that inner sense of energy is you start to feel the interconnectedness of everything.

You actually feel it. You sense that we’re, that we live in a magical, magical in the greatest sense of the word, a domain and things interchange in that you start to feel the rightness of experience and you see you understand, and you feel the underlying sense of reciprocity of karma. You start to feel that it’s a feeling, you see it. That’s true. Um, so in the same way, you you’re, the first stage is focused on fee on body. And the second stage is focused on feelings. Therefore, you, you, the, any disciplines that need to be enacted with the second stagers are done by agreements, it’s like, tell you what you set the every Friday night and you get to pick the movie for the family. Okay? Okay. Let’s shake on it. Cause it’s a sensation of exchange of energy. That makes most sense where the first stage it says, I can do it the second stage or says, I feel therefore I am.

And the, you keep developing these new feelings and feelings come up. As we know for no reason at all, when you’re eight, nine years old, you’re just suddenly you feel bad or weird, or you start to get sensation that I’m a man or a boy, sorry, I’m a boy. Or I’m a girl, or I’m halfway in between or whatever it is, these feelings just erupt. And it’s like, I always imagine it. The, the image of the second stage is a bird because feelings fly can learn to fly. And when those feelings first crack open, they’re pretty ugly and they can’t fly right away. But, you know, after some nurturing, then they do fly. So, um I tell kids when you, you know, everybody knows when they’re, you’re just sitting around for no reason. And also weird feeling comes on. You and everyone will go, oh yeah, well, a new feeling is being born and, you know, it’s kind of awkward at first, but it’s going to be, it can grow to a complete kind of new let go.

That is wonderful. So you have to be able to, the fulfillment of the second stage of life is that you can get, as you, as you mentioned last time in the flow, you can do things in the flow of things in the first, the first stager can, the test is, will you be a couch potato, the second stager? It’s more like R do you exclude others? When you feel rejected? You may not be rejected. You just might feel it. Do you think it will then I don’t like you either. Or you can’t come to my party. That’s the test is to not reject. When you feel rejected, how

Layman:
Much do you think a person’s ability to not reject when they feel rejected is predicated upon how, how the bodily interactions went with others at the previous?

Frank:
Well, and with the parents too as I said, as Adi Da points out, every inappropriate behavior is a sign of loss of intimacy. So yes, we have to have that trust and that sensation of intimacy as our base. So we have to handle the first stage of life. You have a, it’s like a pyramid. You can handle the first layer of it. And, you know, finally the I above the pyramid of peers when you’re done with the growth process of transcendental “I”. So yes, if you have a weak first stage you’re not gonna, your pyramid is going to look like this, which means they fall over easily. Uh, so the foundation of trust and intimacy, touch care, all those are really important.

Layman:
What’s the role of breadth in this stage, and what degree should children be made aware of the role of breadth in their emotional life at an early age.

Frank:
Well at all ages you know, like I pointed out earlier from the time they can understand, you can, you can do that all along. It’s common knowledge. If you take a breath, you’ll feel better, right? It’s hear it on TV even. At18 months, they can do it with you really well. About four, you can ask them, well, you can take a breath by yourself and they can hear in the second stage. It’s very important. You start because breath is a form of energy, a breath in almost every language has to do with feeling the etheric or feeling the energy dimension. Uh, I tell the kids, rub your hands back and forth really quickly. If you like this, you can start to feel energetic. Cause you stimulate your nerve endings really quickly. You’ll now. And I now breathe it. Now you can feel that going out from your hands and a breath is central and key to being able to do that. You’re sensitive to others. When somebody comes in the room, you can feel how they are, even if they’re not, even if they’re putting on an act, if you’re, it even takes a little powder, see through the mask of social personas, but even a second stager can do that. So when you’re

Layman:
Teaching kids who are in the second stage what sorts of disruptions do you tend to see and how do you respond to those?

Frank:
Well they’re if they understand what’s going on, I always thought that if you teach kids about this, you can say, Hey, are you trying to remember art in my classroom? We were giving attention, not getting attention. You know, you can start to show them. There’s, there’s a, there is a cognitive adjunct that is useful. Uh, but just being open yourself being humorous about your situation, being, being able to let go of the roles of the second stage is all about role. Thursdays will be about rules. So role, you know, to make even fun of some of the roles and say, Hey, I don’t want to be the bad teacher here. Oh yeah. You know, you can take, you can use these things. So it’s not a method. It’s not a technique. It’s a, you can, you have to bring your own human humanity in your own vulnerability.

And they can, they’ll respond to that a lot. I used to ask my kids what they liked about my tea, every, the end of every year, what they liked about my way I taught. And every time they said, oh, when you’re, when we, when we mess up and you’re really angry at us, you and we go, okay, and we get it, you drop it like that. Every time they almost, every year this gets went, oh, when you get angry, you know, we understand we messed up, but then when it, but when we go, okay, we’ll sweat doing that. You go, oh, okay. And you drop it. So it’s not a technique. It’s a, there’s no tech. There’s nothing I can tell you go, oh, you’re just willing to do this. Tell them to take three breaths and count backwards from 10. Oh, I hate that stuff. Wow. While it may work, it’s more about the human that gave the instruction, then the instruction itself.

So one of the things about the energetics of the second stage is that you get really into something and you can’t, you’re obsessive either obsessive on one pan, the other types of people get dreaming. So in either case, they can’t hear the mom calling him from dinner, you know, there’s like, I’m so into building this thing or I’m so into this game or, or I’m just not just thinking about this, that you can be captured by your own immersion in the etheric dimension. That’s something that you can tell the child, this is what this is, this is your task right now. That’s what you’re doing with your energy. So that’s something they can understand. They go, oh, so that’s, um you have to be sensitive to your own energy interplay. And if you get mad, then that’s, that’s an occasion to say learning to teach. I’m sorry. Um, and they understand that, you know,

Layman:
You know, seems like a really important thing for adults to appreciate, because I know there’s a, there’s an old school tendency to want to intervene on obsessions and daydreams and bring them back to reality. You know? And I think, you know, not too many generations ago, very often some violence was involved in this and trying to make them be realistic relative to the situation that we’re facing. Um, and so that’s, you know, I understand that in the short-term, that might be a way to accelerate their adaption to particular tasks that pride might have to face, but it seems like a danger in terms of long-term development,

Frank:
Right? No, it’s, it’s, it’s not, it’s never necessary. And it’s really a sign of failure and you know, so you can do it, you can be done, it can be done well. And both parenting like teaching, I I’ve often said is an imperfect art. It’s not a science is not just know these 10 techniques and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. They’re just trying to take your money. It’s an imperfect art. And the only thing that makes it work beautifully is if you’re always trying, if you’re trying the children understand that they understand you’re not, you’re not perfect, even though their idealisms will tend to be that way. Uh, but you can say you can mess up and yell too much and then say, oh man, I screwed up. I’m so sorry. Let’s will you forgive me? And then that way they just learn how to do that themselves. So almost every parent I’ve ever met underestimates the does not accurately understand where their children are at. They always think they’re a stage or a mini stage or two behind. And the children always are more have more depth than you can imagine. Sometimes

Layman:
Just before we go to the third stage, there’s a little bit of a, a tangent there. That’s really interesting to me because I’ve hosted this other series about sexuality. And so one of the questions that comes up a lot is how do you convey sexual information to kids? And then one of the underlying questions there is, you know, when is it the appropriate time? Do you wait for them to ask it? Or is that already a little bit too late? And you should have indication earlier.

Frank Marrero
Yeah, you can initiate. Here’s here. Here’s your good guideline answer their questions at the level. They asked them, that’s a really good guideline. So if they, you know, and we appreciate it, we also, this is another example, emotions and sexuality are intertwined. We sex, like we emote we. And so if we’re emotionally crippled, our sexuality is going to be degenerative or interrupted. And it’s only when our F our own, the, the fullness, just like the fullness of the first stage is the kid who was able to run down the path without checking to see if he’s okay. The fullness of the second stage is free flow. You can, now that’s why you in the Vedics you treat him like a servant so that they can give their energy so they can convey their energy so they can dance their brains out so they can play.

That’s why it’s really good. In the second stage for children to take up music, playing, listening art of showmanship, being a puppeteer, being a doing things that show, put it out for others. That is their job as it were is sir serving the meals you know, taking all the plates from the kitchen to the dinner table. That’s what they’re best at doing. They learn how to do that. So we’ve got to learn to let our feelings go in the second stage that translates into sexual, into actual sexuality later, but the emotional basis of sexuality is emotional. And you’ve got to let your feelings be able to let your feelings go. Obviously, the second stage of life emotional fluency is huge. You’ve gotta be able to talk about real things in real terms and they can. So and partly by guiding and partly by a confession confession, instead of telling us always a uh, a good modality, what did he tell you all to do it from your head? And you can fast, you do it from the center of your being.

Layman:
So we’ve got two 12 year olds and a 14 year old in the house. So the, the third stage, the maybe the socio intellectual awakening is most pertinent to my own life. Guide me through some general characteristics of phase three.

Frank:
There is a let’s start with a very critical distinction. The first two stages of life have a background mood of dependence. Mom, can I do this? Dad, can I do that? But that’s always there always there dependent. And, and that’s right in the third stage, they don’t go to mere deep independence, but rather there’s an oscillation between independence of dependence that oscillation between independence and dependence creates an underlying mood of dilemma. The mood of the adolescent, is that a dilemma? Well, I could do this, but oh, I can do it there, but, well, I can do this, but there’s all but stake, as I would tell the kids to, you know that dilemma is constant in the second, the third stage, you have to appreciate that there, the adolescents are always in dilemma, even if it’s a back only a background loop. Sometimes it comes full forward and in unbelievable anxiety, but it’s always there structurally. It’s not a personal problem. It’s a structural problem. It’s one of the things I love love of teaching me to understand that there’s been a structural problem in a personal problem. The dilemma is inherent in the structure of it. Yeah. It doesn’t

Layman:
Mean that something’s gone wrong. It means that you’re in phase two.

Frank:
That’s right. And you have not. The goal is to jump ahead just to see it in context, the, in the, in the same way, the first stage is body. The second stage is emotions and energies sensitivities. The third stage is mind. The other side of that coin is will you so they’re starting to develop what mind and will the fulfillment of that stage would be when the, the under you, and they understand what it is to grow up. They understand what it is to take responsibility. And they, they understand what it would take to bring their life into harmony, and they will do it. So it’s the, when the will has harmonized the lower life and integrated and therefore integrated it, that is the fulfillment of the third stage. So that’s good to see the, the, the span of it there, right? Uh, they, the first stage he says, I can do it the second stage or says, I feel therefore I am the third stage.

Frank:
He says, I understand I will. Now, when that first breaks out, the person that I wheel is against is you the apparent you may have noticed, but one of the task explicit task of the third stage is to understand their own psycho makeup, how they, how they react to men and women based on how they react to their mom and their dad, how they, how, because when they were eight years old, such and such happened now, they’re, they always hate line or whatever it is, they need to have a pretty thorough all I’ll be at basic self-understanding.

Layman:
How do you, how do you facilitate that?

Frank:
Well, you talked to them directly about, Hey, do you see how you do that? It’s like, they can understand here. Here’s the thing. Okay. The, where the first stage, or understands through stories, the second stage, or understands through myths, the Thursday, or understands the concepts. You go from preset to concept. And they can understand starting about 12 the Triune brain, the higher brain. The higher brain starts awakening and concepts are available to them. They’re not many gods. There’s one God in terms of historical sociological evolution. So that, that they understand the principle. So you can invite them into understanding ideas, patterns, concepts, oh, you can read stories and say, well, what’s the moral of the story. You can maybe do that with the second stagers, but they’ll say it on a more basic level here. You can be very, you are one of the explicit task of an adolescent is to develop discrimination.

Are you easily fooled? You know, that’s, you can see, oh yeah. I particularly, I’m very naive about social interactions myself. I see that that’s something for me to learn. Um, people can take advantage of me easily. I’m the last person to get a joke. Uh, those kinds of things in a, the they, they, it should have a diary. They should be charged with self-understanding. And like Socratic said, Socrates said an unexamined life is not worth living. They can understand that. And so they understand the difference between short-term happiness and long-term happiness. They understand what the, the automaticity of Narcissus in every being and they see it in themselves. They so these are not just, I mean, a lot of mythology is actually what I call primary psychology. That’s why Freud , got it, you know, but they can understand it as a principle. And so that is one of their tasks to do, to understand through all these ways. So it’s explicit. It’s not something that’s just going to seep in because they watched five star wars movies. I promise you.

Layman:
So that’s on the understanding side where you can help with uh, prompting conceptual examination of the world, but also particularly of themselves and their own psyche on the other side, which is the Will’s side. Um, you know, what supports the development of, of healthy and effective willpower?

Frank:
Oh, well, the, you know task, they have to co-create responsibility, freedom dynamic. Here’s what it looks like in the first stage. Or you tell the kid what to do. No, you have to go to this second stage or you make an agreement. Okay. That’s an agreement. Let’s shake on it. The third stage is, I like to say you can’t make an agreement with a teenager. Of course you can. But as a joke, which is a good joke, you can’t make an agreement with interstate, nor can you just tell them what to do. You’re going to do that. That won’t work. Now. They can, they can make an agreement. If they understand it, they go, okay, you can go, you can’t go to them and says, you have to do this, this and this. Instead, you have to go look, Hey, you’ve grown up a little bit.

Now the house takes a lot of work. You may have noticed, what do you think your responsibilities could be here on this ship? And let them come up with it. You go, you have to change from being a parent, the absolute mommy, daddy figure to being a friend you, and in some cases, in most cultural incidences, in the history of the world, there’s been explicit ceremonies about the release of childhood and parents say, I know I will. I’m relinquishing the mommy daddy role. And I’m now going to be your helper in your trial adulthood. And so you never go, you have to do this. You go, what do you think? And so ask them list all the freedoms they want. That’s the easy part. Then you list now list a bunch of responsibilities that you show, that you deserve, those freedoms make good grades. Yeah.

You can stay out all Saturday night. Do you have straight A’s or whatever it is, you know? And then, and then the third list is their creation. The consequences. If they don’t make them, if they don’t meet their intended responsibility. And then when they screw up, you go, this is the, it puts the parent in this, in the position of graciousness. You go, oh, Hey, you that up. I did too. Well, you did a lot better than I did, but I was 16. Uh, but you said you were going to do this. Do you still think that your, your consequence should be that? Or do you think you were hard on yourself or easy on yourself? What do you think? Always? What do you think? What do you think you

Layman:
Can bring it back to their assessment?

Frank:
That’s the only way it really works. It really just like you can’t talk to a four year old. Why don’t you understand Johnny? Because if everybody did that, wha, wha, wha, wha. That work, what really works is what do you think? Well, what do you think? Well, here’s the responsibilities. Here’s the freedoms. Here’s the freedom you took, but here’s the bad thing that happened. Why is that? What do you think? Well, what do you think you should do? So that is, there’s a lot of will for you right there. Uh, of course there’s the third stage is all about achievement, you know, and since, and you notice that we’re we’re and not being subjugated and rejecting the be doing what you’re told. We, we, in cultural historical terms, we went from parent child modalities from Pharaoh’s to Kings, to a declaration of independence. That’s the beginning of adolescents and in cultural world history.

Now we’re at now we’re suffering hyper independence. That is the, is the dark side, the unseen, dark side of that. Uh, without having the explicit, bring it into harmony, charge everybody in, you’ll notice all the movies, you see somebody doesn’t listen to somebody and then they achieve it. Or then it’s all the adolescence is riddled throughout the culture. Oh, I didn’t do it because I wasn’t told I rebelled. And I became the star. That is so common movie theme, because that is what adolescents need to do. It is good to accomplish. So set themselves out goals, work for them, understand the process of attention, building your attention. So that’s my, my curriculum, big philosophy for little kids is not only this, how to grow up, but what are the basic fundamental things we need to know for that children could understand? So there’s a lot of will.

Layman:
You mentioned the the idea that a lot of the more ancient cultures had specific rituals to divide up these maturational phases we don’t really have very much of that. Um, is it essential? Like what’s the, what’s the minimum degree of ritual marking or, or deal or rites of passage that we might want to even improvise? If we haven’t had one handed to us.

Frank:
Absolutely, I have on my website FrankMarrero.com. I have a thing called the transcendence of childhood ceremony, where I do a quick review world cultures and how they’ve marked this particular transition and how we can adapt that in modernity. Obviously, in some cultures, many cultures, the children left home at 12 or 13, you know, and lived with another group of their own gender or lived with someone else or went to the army or, you know, there’s all kinds of ways that that was acknowledged in, well, we’re not going to do that in modernity 99% of the time, but we can change explicitly. And I made explicit and you write down dear Salem, I am no longer your daddy. Uh, I’m now your friend. And I want you, I want to assist you as your friend. I will. I, I hear by cease holding it over you, that I’m the dad.

And I want to work with you. Uh, and it based on your own assessments of helping your life, think of me as a friend now, instead of dad burned it in a fire, have them have it under having understood the same thing, make a ceremony, you can make a ceremony. It’s ceremonies are good because they mark transitions. So that’s something you can do. You can read how lots of cultures did it. Like I said, if it’s called the transcendence of childhood ceremony on my website, that is something anyone can do, but they have to understand what is it to grow up? You can’t do it just because you want to. And then you fail as that as I tell people, this method is guaranteed to fail. It just feels less than the other ones, because they all fail

Layman:
We talked a little bit about the, um the awakening of the conceptual capacity in this stage. And I noticed that in some of the material you sent me, there was an emphasis on one particular concept, which was temperance. And I’m intrigued about the, you know, the, the way in which the person going through phase three might be able to understand and incorporate that concept and how valuable that might be.

Frank:
Yeah, they have. You have to, like I said, it’s, it’s, it’s imperative that you understand what it is to grow up. So, Socratic, Socrates used to loved to point out that Sophia, wisdom was rooted in. Sophitia a temperance, and you can study this why you can take a loot and if you tune it to lose, it sounds like crap, you did it too tight. It also sounds crap. So it’s not about being all right, perfect and clean and pretty all the time. If there’s a right tightened tightening. And so that’s something they can study and should doesn’t mean you don’t ever kick the jams out. No kicking the jams out is a necessity. And I tell parents, look, everybody’s different. As long you know, your children know there’s a corral, your corral may be small. Joe’s over there. His corrals big, he may think your corral’s too small, and you may think his corrals too big on some level, your both might be a little, right.

But the best thing is there’s a corral that cause children by making limitations, they actually feel embraced instead of restricted. Um, and that’s just a study. A third stager should be charged, understand the study, understand, tell them, well, what does it take? What is, what is temperance? Why is it? Why does a lot of grownups wha, wha, wha about it all the time? Humor always humor is always good, but uh, the end of fulfillment of the third stage of life, WILL you come to harmony emphasis on will? Well, what is harmony, not too tight and not too loose. That’s how harmony is made. That is the fulfillment. Let me go back to the ancient Greeks for a second. As my, as I love to do, you know, the Iliad and the Odyssey, both are both centered on a Odysseus and why, well there’ve been a war for nine years.

As you know, a stalemate at the, at the mythic and the elemental levels. It was even what broke it. When Odysseus figured out that the Trojans mythic worshiped animal was the horse. That’s why they didn’t notice it. They’re embedded in mentality. They’re embedded in mythology. So he made the Trojan horse and they didn’t notice that that was a trick because they were so embedded in their own mythology. The Le the, the level of mentality that exceeds mythology was born, then quote, unquote, that’s why the Greeks love the book so much. And so it was, it was the advent of concept over preset. It was the advent of, of conceptual mind mentality over mythology. That’s what won the war up to for nine years. It was stalemate. It was the advent of that. Now. Uh, so this, this has been the hero of of the Illid. However, when you become clever, when you become clever, you get inside your mind and you can’t get out. You’re thinking, thinking, thinking, I used to love the who song. No one knows what it’s like to be a mad man, sad man, behind blue eyes, you know, and says, I’m always thinking, thinking, thinking, that’s the, that’s the challenge. And the third stage of life is you’re lost in a forest of thinking, thinking, thinking, think, and it’s a prison.

You can’t go home. You can’t rest in gratitude because you’re thinking all the damn time. So to get home is a Odyssey. That’s why the foundation books of the Western civilization are the Iliad and the Odyssey, the word think, and the word thank were originally one word they split off about this time. Being thinking as could be different from thanking. The only way you stop thinking all the time, so much, and being troubled by your ceaseless mind, chatterbox, monkey mind is to grow in thankfulness. That’s the only way. There’s no great idea. It’s a moral life. It’s the gratitude of a moral life. Only in only in strength of gratitude, thankfulness, just thinking become rightly sized. Will you come to harmony? Will you come to harmony? That’s why, if they can see that, then they can understand why restraint is good. It’s neither too loose or too, or too tight.

Layman:
So the conceptual analysis or suggestion of thankfulness and gratitude should also be a primary thing explored in stage three.

Frank:
Absolutely. I have no problems with concepts. I love them just like I love my genitals and my right hand and my capacity to dance. Love it all. Okay.

Layman:
So we’ve got this expansion. We’ve got the cunningness of Odysseus expanded beyond these symbolic assumptions of the previous phase. And it’s a tremendous increase in spaciousness capacity. And yet it’s got some kind of limitation because we seem to be uh, as your master frequently critiqued stuck in a civilization that somewhere in this phase where independence, autonomy is separativness, tactical, and strategic and mechanical cunning, sort of dominate the world. And on mass, we haven’t really been able to make that next transition very well. So talk a little bit about, about the cul-de-sac that we’re in, about how we get stuck at this adolescent phase,

Frank:
Right? Exactly. No one ever grows up because it’s a good idea. It doesn’t happen. Nobody grows into adolescents, go, okay. I think I’ll grow up. Never has happened in the history of the world. Why do you grow up? Because you get your own shit shoved back in your face and you go, oh, I’ve been a manipulative asshole. I don’t want to do that anymore. That is what is required. Humankind will weep. It’s going to be bad. The only, there’s not going to be a new reset with some kind of automaton shut…. That’s a, that’s a parent child of framework. The only as Adi Da says, the only thing that will make the changes. If everybody all at once says, so, no, we’re not going to live like that anymore. That’s what will change. Well, what would make it so that everybody says, we don’t want to exploit the Amazon so I can have an extra McDonald’s.
:
If your shit gets shoved back in your face, hard enough, and you go, I don’t want, we don’t want to live like this. Humankind must weep. Weeping is what is ahead of us. If we, if there’s enough of us who have grown into real adulthood, we can have some kind of a soft landing. And if not, how long would the dark ages be? Those are that’s. Those are the kind of what’s in front of us. It’s not pretty as growing up, never is. It’s a, you have to weep human kindness about to weed a lot. And the more people that go through their own personal weeping and grow into moral gratitude, service, self transcending, temperance devotion to what is great. The more that happens in stability, the softer our landing will be. So I’m crying for you. I’m pleading with him, for everybody to take on the task and growing up, really grow up.

Layman:
Uh, I guess what I’m imagining is a threshold, which on the one side is characterized by a skill and a confidence in expressing gratitude and a host of similar emotions. And also this willingness to face a reckoning and take on what we’ve excluded. And if that doesn’t happen, there’s this other side, which I think is associated with your mythic image of the three-headed dragon. And maybe you could take us through what that, what that dragon is and how we face it.

Frank:
When you get to be think…. When you get to thinking too much, first of all, the background of all adolescents is dilemma. That drives us all crazy. As I tell the kids, nobody escapes the three headed dragon. Everybody gets bitten in the ass by the three-headed dragon. The question is, will you be consumed? Will you be killed? But will you be destroyed by the three-headed dragon? Nobody passes. Nobody gets a free pass here. So the three heads, the three heads are dilemma doubt. Now doubt is a wonderful, it tells you from shit from shinola is we say in America, you have to doubt. Doubt is part of the onset of the discriminative. Mind hoo-ray for doubt, make doubt into a siddhi, a power that it has to be so strong. It doubts itself because it cannot be a modality of living. It has to be a tool.

We like a sword we can wheel or not. If you’re always doubting everything, been there done that I don’t know about that you haven’t doubted doubt itself yet. You’re still using that. And doubt will you can’t believe is for children. Doubt is for adolescents. What’s beyond that is open minded, discriminative appreciation beyond that is light itself. We are the subjective and the objective becomes one. So we do have to develop doubt, but we cannot be ruled by it. Uh, the third but as we, no doubt can be quite a crush. And it’s not just doubt that’s ahead. It’s doubt. That’s also bodily. And you walk around, you see people with their shoulders, kind of walk into a walk like this. That’s an also an expression of doubt. The signature of immature thought, particularly immature religious thought is doubt of the body. Therefore, doubt of sex, therefore, suppression of women.

You may have noticed a little bit of this in the world. That’s also a form of doubt. It’s not just head doubt. There’s also whole bodily doubt. Stand up, take a big breath of the magnificent, recognize the wonder, the beauty, the divinity of our real existence. That’s what a third stage does starts to do that. Not from a separative point of view, not like, oh yeah, there’s God. And I can go get there. And that’s just, that’s nice start. But you have to understand this is divine. This is beauty. And all I am doing is constricting within it. I start to have a self-understanding whereby I see how I disturb this joy. That’s real self-understanding so then you see how you doubt your doubt is a constriction. You’re doing it when you don’t see it. And you were pressed down by your unchecked thinking. Mind is depressing.

So dilemma, doubt and depression are the three headed dragon of adolescence. What is the cure? What is the solution is to live a moral serving, giving temperate life grow up, take on responsibilities. And the secret of that is that to it happily, even while you’re fucked up in all three stages, not go, oh, I really got to heal this trauma. Well, I’ve got to fix this. No, Hey. Yeah, I’ve got to fix this. Oh yeah. I’ve got to do some things that are counter to that. You can do it happily. If you’re always in the fix it mode, you’re not doing it in the right mode. Th th th th well, you it’ll work. It’ll just take a really long time. Ask any Freudian psychologist. Uh, it doesn’t work in the fix. It mode. What you have to do is discriminative. Understand what you have missed and critically understand what you do, how you , and then happily address it as is. My beloved says spiritual life is the magnification of well being. So understand the magnification of well being, because we all, all already are in this happiness. Happiness is the actual substance of reality, and we’re doubting it and dilemma about it and depressed about our thinking. And so understand that live a moral serving self transcending, grateful life. And you will slowly, but surely come to gratitude. It’s an Odyssey indeed, to come home.

Layman:
It seems like an essential complimentary component of psychological diagnosis, because a lot of people get described, say, as depressive in this period, and you would think that unless they’re able to understand that embody and appreciate being already worthwhile and happy, then only after that, could you start to figure out whether they don’t have enough potassium where their brain doesn’t produce serotonin correctly or something like that, that we might have to treat in another manner, but that would only be a viable diagnosis if they were already capable of demonstrating themselves as happy beings,

Frank:
Right? That’s right. You, you, there, there are a host of ordinary responsibilities. We, we must take the potassium balances, the talk with mom. You never had the talk with dad. You wish you had had even if they’re, they’re doing it on the gravestone, whatever it is, psychologies, those are all great ordinary responsibilities, but are we have a radical responsibility to recognize that we live in beauty, it’s a radical responsibility. This is such a Sat Chit Ananda. This is divine. As, as, as the master of the Christian said, change your way of looking and seeing, and the kingdom or the state of divinity is at hand repent. The kingdom of heaven is at hand, is the medieval translation, terrible translation change your way of looking and, and living in the estate of the divine or the heavenly state is at hand, that’s a radical responsibility, the ordinary responsibilities support that, but should they not sequential?

Layman:
How do you think about the the relationship between the capacities that predominate in the lower stages and versions of those capacities that are important to work on in higher stages? Because it seems like there’s a difference between the adolescent intellect and Einstein or the authors of the Sutra or a different kind of use of the intellect. Likewise, learning to be a bodily creature in the first stage has an echo, but it’s different from people who are trying to reclaim their total sematic wholeness and the emotional life of the second stage is a little bit different than learning the subtle skills and feeling arts of a more complex human being. And yet they seem connected in some way,

Frank:
Yes, they are, but, you know, we could talk about that for hours, but if we don’t, if we handle the, if we handle these essential aspects of the first three stages of life, all of the other questions are going to be answered. That’s why Socratic’s has always said, just tend to your soul, your feeling being, if you’ll do that, all of the other questions will be naturally answered. So yes, there are correlations between the lower centers of the body and the higher centers, and that’s a worthy and another, that’s a worthy another conversation.

Layman:
All right. So a reasonably competent passage through these first three stages. If that’s attained, then you’re in a pretty good spot for your ongoing development to proceed, you know, with it’s sort of full compliment of skills and options. So I’ve got to find about that. The first thing that comes up to me is let’s say you’re an adult and you don’t have, you didn’t have perfect passage through those phases. You might be hung up in some of those areas.

Frank:
Well, like I said, the key is has do it happily. Yeah. You have to develop two things, one discrimination about what it really is. And you can get caught up in all kinds of “Oh, this is the right”…. This is the right, so-and-so the only with this somatic experience and you got to rebirth and all that stuff. Well, some of that is good, but you have to that’s one of the things in the third stage of life develop a capacity for acute discrimination and you actual real study is required. So and it’s nice to you know, of course I wholeheartedly recommend the teachings of Adi Da on this, on this subject, take up great teachers who have talked about this. When my, our workbook comes out, what is it to really, really grow up based on what we’ve learned from him. That’s a good way to do it, but steady is required.

And then with heart and openness go forward and, and happily do it. If you try to always fix yourself, you’re not in the right mood yet. It’s about the magnification of well being. There is a place of well being, always available to us. It may be tiny, but it’s always available the magnification of that. Then you rightly engage the things that you need to do, not from a problem point of view, but from a view that’s grounded in reality. And what is reality? It’s light itself. Have you heard the good news energy equals matter times? The speed of light squared. This is, this is a realm of light. This is beauty. This is beauty full. And we are, we have to come to the, a rad… Not only a ordinary, but a radical appreciation of how we are interfering with this joy. That’s the discrimination that is necessary.

That’s a third stage tech, that’s a third stage a requirement. So we all growing up. And when do you know that you’re growing up? When you start loving, real loving, not romantic, not I love being go not, I love baseball and I lovvvvve you, honey, True love. And we all know we could have a whole, we could have a whole session on the kinds of loves, but I’ll just say real love for now. Um, and then there’s stages of that. But when you really love, because you’re, which is a self transcending, that’s one of the things you prepare for in the third stage, you understand yourself so that you can step beyond it.

Layman:
That’s how it shows up in the third stage, but there’s something in that there’s some basic, um insights structure that’s pertinent to all the stages. And I’m curious about it, as I understand it uh, the Adi Da teaching has these sort of symbiotic components and one is the need to mature and develop through all the stages. Um, and as a person develops, they become more and more aware of some kind of transcendental or radical context shifts. That’s also available. But on the other hand, that shift or the, that insight leads to that shift can also help you more gracefully accelerate your growth through these stages. That’s right. All right. So that’s, um,

Frank:
That’s why I said, you know you have to uh, realize one of the secrets is to be happy about it. You know, that is that that gives the elegance or grace. Great to me, grace is the elegance of reality, but so get in touch with reality. What reality is is-ness itself this most wonderful, more than wonderful that he says. So get in touch with that, with this just open, open, faced, open incarnate, freely incarnate, openness, get in touch with this and then go, oh, oh, Ooh, that looks bad. You know, we all have underwear issues. We all have uh, grow up issues. Well, we don’t need to go into dilemma about it. You can, you can do it happily. And we all know what that, that shift is. That shift is important. And, and you’re right, the more we take ordinary responsibilities, often times our radical capacities are, are enhanced, but it’s still radical.

It’s radical because it cuts through everything. And it goes to the core radical as he points out means at the root it’s not radical, like Abbie Hoffman, it’s radical in. It goes to the root of what we’re talking about radical as in radish goes to the root. Um, and so that capacity is true. Anytime we don’t exercise that a lot when we’re embedded in our problems, no doubt about it. And we do have to have a certain amount of ordinary human maturation, and we don’t need to perfect any of it just reasonably addressed, because reality is so great.

Layman:
Do you think of these stages as sort of being completely they’re all with us to begin with, like the chakras and they get emphasized in different stages? Or do you think of it in terms of the sort of Neo scientific concept of emergence where you don’t necessarily have your third stage until you develop it? You don’t necessarily have your fourth stage until it grows out of you. Are they all there or do we bring them into being?

Frank:
Why did, why do we have brains that this for 50,000, a hundred thousand, 200,000 years, that have the capacities far exceeded our needs, the structure of human maturity and even spiritual maturity are already all, all the levels are already with us, just like the brain. You can take somebody from 80,000 years ago and put them in Harvard it’s that you don’t need to go through all the stages from 80,000, the brain is always ready. They can be a mystic, you know, they can become a world scientist and a mystic and a a Saint from it’s all present in. It is in the structure of existence that having been said, there are developmental parts. There are karmas. I may have come into this lifetime with a karma really, really, or do you think, or, you know, but I could have, and there’s comments that come along, you know, so it’s not a pat answer.

The great issue is to come to a vision of real existence, which is joy God given, so to speak and demonstrated beautifully and go, right. That’s what I’m interested in. And then go, oh, I’m still got my hands up my ass. Take my hand out of my ass. Okay, I’m going to go up. I got my but still going with you. You know, I’m a fish like Orpheus and Jesus. I’m a Fisher of men and him a Fisher of humans because see, get a vision of what is most real and what is most real is magnificent. Love, living, magnificent joy, perfect free humorous incarnation. And I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it up close and personal find that first. And then you will rightly handle all this other business that needs to handle And it still takes a god damn long time.

Layman:
From a position of joy, let’s talk a little bit about the conventional education in school system. Um, what, what’s your take on what might be insufficient or going wrong there in terms of helping people maximize their natural maturation through these phases, and you know, what sorts of correctives could there be? What’s a better general school system.

Frank:
Uh, there’s no vision, that’s, what’s wrong. It’s an industrial model made for, to make people who can hit timecards. And even the, even the people that try to address that have only a vision of a, of a more whole bodily application, which is a great improvement, but there’s still no. What can any of those people who in education tell you what it is to really grow up? If you know what it is to really grow education is the normal life within that. I education because ontogeny recapitulates, phylogeny education, rightly recapitulates history. And there are patterns that you notice, not only do you recapitulate history, then you see where it’s going, because you understand the process of growing up. Think of Isaiah of Deuteronomy. As we often do a 2,500 years ago. And he said, look in those times, when things are really going to, the shit the fan, what did he say?

How do you describe the year? There will be a river rivers were run bitter as wormwood in a smoke will be hanging over all the cities. These are the signs of the pangs of the new birth. Well, was he just had a really cool crystal ball. No, he understood the, the structure of maturation. And what does the adolescent do? He or she manipulates. That’s how they do it. They, they make an abstract difference, like, like Hamlet holding the, a skull of who was it, whoever. Yeah. So as if, as if death were an object, death is not an object by the way, as, so we make this schism, which makes great science, same word, schism and science are the same word you make this schism, which makes for great science, but then you get abstracted away from yourself. You’re even remember that old song. I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, that’s, that’s that schism. And that’s the schism that takes a long time to come to thankfulness. That makes an Odyssey of coming to thankfulness. You have this abstraction, even from yourself, not only you’re abstracting from everybody else. And therefore what you naturally do is manipulate yourself, your others and the world. And in the future, they’re going to do that so widespread that our smoke will hang over. All the cities and rivers will run bitter as wormwood. The manipulation by adolescents has been foretold for thousands of years.

If we do not understand what it is to grow up so that we repent to use a crappy word repent from our manipulation. We never love, we never actually even grew up a little bit so that we can have intimates and have a reasonable chance that relationship. So we have to understand what it is to grow up. The vision is necessary. That will transform education as it transforms everything else. That is what is necessary. What’s fortunately we have models. Uh, unfortunately we were still in a world where we are we’re in a world of provincials that have outgrown their province. And everybody thinks their own little provincial. God is universal just because they’re God happens to be universal. It’s a, it’s a uh, a misplacement. My daddy is better than your daddy is the, is kind of the stupid state stage we’re in. Well, if you don’t understand what it is to grow up, you’ll think your daddy is better than your, my daddy is better. You know, when you grow up, when you finally realize that your daddy is just a dad and they did pretty good by you or so then, then you that’s when you that’s, when you can accept others. So I think the main thing to do is to develop a healthy studied sense of discrimination about all the provinces, about what it is to grow up and look at examples of people who have grown,

Layman:
Um, lack of vision in the educational system seems like it misses a real opportunity because schools are one of the few areas of life where we really see something like developmental stages, right? We’ve got like preschool, kindergarten elementary school, high school, and those are roughly approximate. This thing, cause high school is roughly the time period of the third stage, but then we have post-secondary education, but it doesn’t really seem to do anything for the fourth stage. It just seems to third stage,

Frank:
The whole world is filled in, in an adolescent phase. The post is just extended adolescence, adulthood, human culture is extended adolescents.

Layman:
I’m very curious about what, what a real post-secondary institution would look like in terms of helping people move to that fourth stage. And we talked a little bit before we got started about the Greek tradition of using drama as a way to help migrate from the third to the fourth.

Frank:
Right? Well, that’s what draw that’s what theater is, is the theater anciently was the theatrical dramatic representation of the stages into the fourth so that we had a vision. So the vision was, but now you can have television about anything. There is no transformation. That was the original…. That was the theater. The theater was invented to show this transformation, not only the Iliad and the Odyssey were the foundation books of Western civilization to highlight the onset and the liability of adolescents. No doubt about it. Concept over precept and in the birth of Athena, out of the forebrain, Clever’s clever Athena out of the forebrain where concept happens, that’s the Athenians and what did they do? They, what was the in 550 BCE assisted us commenced the building of the first theater in the Western world with marble steps and the whole nine yards.

And what did they show? Why did they have it there to show the story of Dionysus going through his stages of growth? And the primary one is to go from the third stage to the fourth stage. That is the origin of theater. That’s why theater was invented. That’s what you’re supposed to see. Thea is the word for I see, Theater, or what are you supposed to see when you see theater, you’re supposed to see a transformation. That’s what it is. So we need to regain and recoup all the wisdom that we have skimmed over. See that it has depth. And we also need to see the visions that are given to us by greatness, great avatars like Adi Da or your own favorite realizer it’s from the, from the higher stages. The first three are all the same, grow up. You know, as, as Adi Da says, first become human and there’s an error we make in the third stage of life that we can turn to the heart, oh, I just turned to the heart, right?

We all have, how’s that going for you, everybody. It fails. It’s not just persisting in it. There’s an error in that. That is something that I can do in the story of Dionysus. That was the origin of theater. The way he transitioned out of adolescence is through the baptism of Zeus’s mother Raya. And it’s called the secret women’s mysteries. You have to give yourself up achievement. You do lots and lots of achieving in the third stage. And those are all really good that you’re only outgrow it. When you give yourself up the secret women’s mysteries. It’s not a, it’s not a subjugation. It’s not a surrender in the sense of, oh king. Tell me what to do. We have a, we’re almost allergic to us, even culturally of, of giving yourself up to somebody else. Oh, I got to do that. The king made us the, actually the word subjective comes from the word of people being off of having being subjects of a king.

So we have a lack of subjectivity that actually is rooted in the, in the, in the disdain for having being subject of king. So we’re always going stand up for yourself. What do you think? Well, that’s good to be an adolescent within post adolescents. You give yourself up again. You love, you kiss the feet of your lover. You, you do anything for them. You surrender. This is not subjugation. This is the secret women’s mysteries. And that is the key out of the out of the third stage. It is once you have been nurtured, sufficient, slowly nurturing in Latin adolescent, it means nurturing. Once you have been nurtured sufficiently, then you give yourself up to the transmitted spirit force and you give yourself up. This is not the same flow state that everybody loves to talk about. That’s the second stage thing flow state. That’s the end of that’s the fulfillment of the second stage. The flow of the onset of the four stage of life is to receive spirit baptism.

That changes party to celebration that sacrifices the bridge from adolescence to adulthood. The word adult is the past perfect participle of adolescents. You’ve already been an adolescent. You are already nurtured. Now you are an adult. So adult, what truly adulting is, is beyond achievement. You use, you can receive fully not achieve with magnificence. That’s also required. You must be able to put your will together and achieve things that’s required of adolescents. And so all of the cultural trumpets of, oh, he achieved this summit, great thumbs up. Now let’s grow up. Now there’s more. And what is more is, cannot be achieved. And you must submit to when the spirit comes upon you, you must yield. There’s your secret women’s mysteries. That is the transition.

Layman:
So stage three requires a fulfillment of all the adolescents scale, building of understanding and will self-regulation and achievement capacity. And then it requires the understanding of how to go beyond these things. In on the one hand being able to receive our shit back to us, we’ve been on the other end, being able to make gestures of gratitude and surrender that are adequate, that we connect with something that’s sort of inherently nourishing, which we also have to learn how to receive. And a lot of that is symbolized in the great sacred dramaturgy of the ancients, such as the early Greek theater. And I have another question about theater, which is, is it how useful is it for the adolescent to engage in that practice of being in theater? Right? Like it seems like the taking roles and experiencing the plurality of the self and being able to have distance from what you’re doing and yet be completely in it that those are, might be really important skills and skills important to understanding the, the richness and diversity of the human experience, what it’s like to be lots of different Kinds of people

Frank:
It’s a great study for a variety of reasons. First things like Oedipus. There’s a lot of psychological information in those in there. There’s a lot of the real theater has a lot of true lessons wisdom. Um, the second is, you know, what the Greeks, what the Romans called the mask were called. You would speak through per the mask speaking the sound Sona. So you’re, what is a person is someone who speaks to a mask in the Helene’s, the Athenians, they called it hypocrites. So if you don’t know that you have a mask, you are just a hypocrite.

So can you take the mask off only if you have sufficient character? So the depth of character is what is required. You know, we all have this highs and lows that we go through. It’s like waves, right? You have to be able to stand below the waves. What do you, what do you experience when you stand below the waves, the ocean, and what is it, what is the word for stand below substance? You have to be a person of substance. Then you Intuit the ocean that gives rise to waves. So I’m saying it over and over again, we have to grow up. We have to be a person of substance and that’s real. And that is the real ocean. You stand below the waves by being a person of substance. The theater’s a great tool that you could do it in a variety of ways. Um, yeah, that’s just another good. One

Layman:
Of the the appreciation of the subconscious, because it seems like, you know, insofar as the stage three adolescent personality, which is tied into Western civilization and maybe modern Western civilization, especially has this notion of the individual rational agents and adolescent very often other linear agents. And we’ve learned a lot of, we we’ve learned a lot of things in terms of our science in the last hundred years, which says, yeah, that doesn’t describe the, even in a scientific sense that there’s so much complexity and non-linearity, and most of your processes are unconscious or subconscious. So is there something about that transition from the third to the fourth that involves appreciating the rest of the patterning of the universe that fell outside of what was available to the adolescent?

Frank:
Great, great question. The third stage is a lot about knowing the, the stages beyond it are about mystery, not knowing that’s why the um, the Lao Tzu,, you know, he would say, if you think, you know, it, you don’t, if you don’t, you know, not knowing is it what there’s um, from the agnostics to allow Lao Tzu but what, what am I buddy Socrates always say Socratic’s is always say the only thing I know is I know nothing. So you do have to give up knowledge. It’s not about knowing the mantra of the adolescent. Well, that’s my point of view. You have to grow beyond point of view. How do you go? That’s unthinkable to most people? What do you mean? No point of view. Everybody has a point of view because their projection and their duh, sorry, for the last hundred years just tells us that we’re just projecting our point of view.

Well, there is a stage beyond adolescents and it is beyond point of view. And it’s a point. It is a stage of divine ignorance. When you, when you’re in love, you don’t worry about knowing something as a, as a simple example, one of my favorite quotes of Adi Da’s all space, the moon and stars, the clouds and sky, the sun itself, and what is beyond are all objects of our expansive interest whereby we counter the effects of our busy self-consciousness and earth consciousness. Therefore always be alive to what you do, not yet, or ever can possess and no wonder rests the vital being and cools the brain. When you are free to know nothing and be nothing, then you may hear what is true. And so become a devotee of the unknown through eternal and always present divine ignorance.

That’s why Adi Da teaches the children, his teaching for children. He teaches them about the mystery is not knowing as an adolescent thing most fully. And it’s great. I have several several limbs put back on me. I really love science. There’s probably no greater lover of science than me. I love science. I just, it’s just, you know, you can, you can you can block out the sun. If you hold a raise in close enough to your eye. So knowledge is important. It’s but it’s this big, you hold it right here. That’s all you see, but it’s really just right this much. So we have to be able to size everything rightly by appreciating knowledge. So just like we learned to appreciate doubt. Doubt is wonderful, but if it starts to be your, your, your modus operandi, you haven’t grown up yet knowledge is the same way.

Knowledge is great. Love it requires you. You required a lot of it, but at some point, just like you give yourself, that’s like achievement, achieving knowledge at some point, the third stage of life achievement for that goes into giving yourself up those secret women’s mysteries. It’s called the women’s mysteries for a reason it’s yielding. It is open. It is fixed. It is not assertive is the opposite of all that. And that is the transition into the fourth stage of life. You know, I’m reminded of a Saint Teresa of Avila how her meditation was just to sit with her eyes down and imagine that Jesus was standing right in front of her, loving her, you know, how hard it is to feel loved. I’m asking that as a personal question, you know how hard it is to feel like you are loved. That’s a very difficult actually.

I think it’s one of the most difficult things to actually in deeply and thoroughly feel that you’re loved. That is the secret women’s ministries receive. As Adi Da says, be heart found by me. The only one who is, you know, the secret women’s mysteries, it’s beyond something, nothing you can achieve. It’s nothing you can know. It’s nothing you can doubt and existence. You have. We have to yield beyond and feel loved and invaded by spirit force. Then we love rightly. Then, then we go back into, when we usually go back into our silly lives and improve a few things, we don’t escape the past by diving into it. We escape the past by living differently in this moment. Yes, I learned from him.

Layman:
Him several themes we’ve come across that we could, and maybe should do a whole episode on. But before we finish up, maybe you could give us a, a quick sense of what the transitions are into the fifth six, seven stages.

Frank:
Well, when you, when you’re in, when you’re stable in love, even for a few breaths, often there’s raptures ops and there’s delight of up in an upper kind. It’s not necessary as Adi Da has pointed out, but lots of people go that way and you become incredibly joyous in the upward fashion and receive the fourth stage of life. By the way is about reception. It’s a downward incarnating receiving. It’s not once that is, has, has its fullness. Then it turns and goes, has an upward thing. That first it’s a full reception of love, real love, be heart found to secret women’s mysteries.

And then there’s a natural turning in the body of that comes down. The front starts going up the back. And when it gets it up really high in the back it’s the brain core brain core gets lighted. And you can see the ventricles of the brain from the inside out. And they look like wings. And thus, we have the swans of the east and the dove of the west. And, and then the, it overflows the crater with the Orphics called the crater. The overflowing crater is also the word for cup. You’ve heard my cup runneth over it’s all fifth stage.

And those are wonderful. Fortunately having not having the maturity to experience this, I’ve been given these baptisms of this by Adi Da personally. So I can speak of it authentically rather than studiously, but it was just a gift, no virtue on my part. Let’s just start with that. Um, and then once the energies of the up and the down have settled sufficiently, there is consciousness itself only, and you turn nothing is as good as that. So you turn away from everything and reside in this. What is called soul realization or consciousness or witness itself. That is the six stage. There is no seven stage beyond that seven stages given from the beginning, by being in the company of someone who is that this it’s not a progression in that sense, it’s not the only progression is growing up and coming to the point where you can receive love.

So the higher stages of a deceptive from an adolescent point of view, it seems like the seven stages beyond the sixth, but that’s from an adolescent point of view from a heart point of view, the seven stages already pouring on you and you just have to adapt to it. So, and that’s the truth anyway, but from an adolescent point of view, you look like you’re going up, up, up, up, up to God. And whereas the pretty close to the opposite is true. You’re being, we’re being baptized poured upon by the one who is always already the case and giving us his, her person in person, just like Teresa of Avila.

That’s a great four-stage vision, her meditation. So the seventh state doesn’t really is not on top, but the first six stages are the first six stages have this kind of hierarchy. The seventh stage is not on top of all of that. The seven stages delight itself of which every stage from clay light is the substance of clay as is the substance of sex. As it’s the substance of achievement. As, as the substance of love as the substance of mystic visions as is the substance of consciousness itself is not beyond that. Light is already the substance of all of that. So unfortunately, it’s perpendicular to the, it’s almost like I know. And that’s an adolescent point of view. There’s also a horizontal method, which goes from the left heart, which is a love baseball. I love you, honey. I love it. Always has this sense of promise.

I love this. It’s we’re going to be so great together. I love this new job, whatever it is, this is big as all outdoors, as I like to say. And then we go to the middle heart, which is what is traditionally called true love or the early Christians use two Greek terms, Agapa and Eros to distinguish between the left heart in the middle heart in the middle heart is a true love, a real for chakra saintly. And then you can, you don’t have to do the mystic. You can go from the middle heart up and do the mystic tour, or you can just go straight to the heart on the right, which is consciousness itself, present the pre life in and as the tacit, well, tacit feeling of being the tacit feeling of being in the heart. That’s the heart on the right? So that’s a horizontal description rather than I, I always had, it always needs to be this upper vertical dimension always needs to be countered by the horizontal dimension because it’s not an up up thing. God is not up. God is here this, so all our up, up up stuff is adolescents going to the, of the mountain going on the adventure, being a warrior that’s third stage. It’s just third stage. Great, but it’s just see it for what it is.

Layman:
I saw a documentary I saw about Ram Dass and the interviewer spoke with Timothy Leary and said to him at one point, well, you know, Ram Dass believes in a higher power, don’t you and Leary sort of laughed. And he reached down and he swiped his hand along the floor, and then he just sat back up and didn’t say anything like, oh, he’s, he’s indicating it’s not higher. It’s it goes deep. It goes all the way down. It’s not directional in that simple sense.

Frank:
Okay. That’s it. Those are all adolescent points of view. Yeah. And we’re in an adolescent culture and you and I, and your listeners are all going to interpret this from an adolescent point of view. But when we really start to understand that it breaks down and it’s not so compelling, and we start to move, we start to take responsibilities for our life in Toto and you know, and we’re available to grace or the elegance of reality. And to the grace of someone who has demonstrated this most beautifully, you know, in, in, in Socratic is a cave. There were the people who just saw the images on the wall, right? And they thought that was reality. They saw the broad outlines. They could describe a person, you know, a silhouette. They can describe a lot of things about that person. They felt that was reality.

And then the people who were by the fire, putting the objects in front of the light, they went, ha we know, we know this is reality, right? These are all cave points of view. That’s an adolescent. The science will show you. It’s just like throwing across there. And you know, that’s the adolescents and the mythic minded see, the broad outlines. And everyone’s chained. Those are all still cave points of view. Point of view is childhood and adolescents know what the word ecstatic means. It needs to stand out. That’s what the word means. Stand out of the cave. There’s no point of view when you’re in ecstasy, that’s gone beyond. And there was another figure in that story, the sunlight man, male, in that particular story, the sunlight man who was the sunlight, and that is Adi Da is the sunlight. Man. There have been many sunlight persons.

They don’t have point of view. They have grown beyond mythic and rational points of view, not in the cave of, well, it’s my point of view, my opinion. That’s out shined in light itself. So I’m so grateful. I’m infinitely grateful that I have been given the gifts I’ve been given. So I could speak to you, but it’s not…..These are gifts from him. Look at him, look at that. Face out, turned out freely incarnate as joy and I, I spent many, many, many hours face, literally face to face with him touching him. And he is the daylight person in person. And never experienced anything but absolute service, absolute joy and his company.

Layman:
Well, let me say that. I I love the clarity that you’re bringing to the healthy transition beyond adolescence, this project of in folding a developmental understanding into the educational process and making that aware in the minds of the children themselves, as they go through, it seems to be really beautiful and important. I always like talking to you. You have a very lively, classical intellect, and you, you hold this, you know, steady brightness and a vocation very strongly. And I love feeding on that. And I, you know, I talked to a lot of people who have spiritual masters and teachers in there. They’re not so happy and overt about it as you are. So that’s a very lovely thing.

Frank:
The graces I’ve been given are unfathomable. And I know I was a semi-illiterate hillbilly who knew nothing. So everything you hear from me that you feel like even a little bit, it was given by him, that is 100% sure. Uh, and he told me to go study the Greeks and he taught me the, to re he told me to Teresa of Avalon. He told me to read uh, all the Ramana Maharshi, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Ramana, all that. He it’s his direction. So I’m I’m glad to be able to pass on in a very human and with the freedom, with a touch of the freedom he gave me to you. I’m glad you appreciate it.

Layman:
Well, thank you, Frank. And I hope we can come back and have some more sessions on some of these other topics that stood out to us along the way.

Frank:
Absolutely. My friend and hope he had me back when we get our, when we get our workbook out, really grow up.